Internet Addresses Are Running Out

Internet users in Turkey: The Internet is running out of addresses, which could limit future growth.

The world is running out of Internet addresses — possibly as soon as next summer there will be none left, and then we have a problem, says the head of the European authority that assigns them.

Axel Pawlik is the Managing Director of RIPE NCC. Its main function, their website says, is “to act as the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) providing global Internet resources and related services to members in the RIPE NCC service region. The membership consists mainly of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), telecommunication organisations and large corporations located in Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia.”

RIPE NCC is one of five such Regional Internet Registries around the world.

We are talking about IP (internet protocol) addresses (like 205.203.140.65), not the named addresses (like europe.wsj.com). To be specific, we are talking about IP version 4 (known as IPv4) addresses.

For the same reason that every phone connected to the network has a unique number, every computer attached to the Internet has a unique IP address. For historical reasons, the Internet currently runs on IPv4 — a 32-bit based system. An IPv4 address consists of four numbers, each of which contains one to three digits, with a single dot (.) separating each number or set of digits. Each of the four numbers can range from 0 to 255.

Down to our last 3% of IPv4 addresses

The maximum number of IPv4 addresses is roughly 4 billion. Back in the infancy of the net this was an inconceivably large number. Alas it has proved all to conceivable.

“We are down to our last 3% of IPv4 addresses,” said Mr. Pawlik. Blocks of IPv4 addresses are assigned by the global authority, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), to the five RIRs as they need them. According to Mr. Pawlik the world is down to its last seven of the 255 allocation blocks.

“There’s a special policy to look after the last five blocks,” said Mr. Pawlik. “One is assigned to each RIR, and that’s it.” He predicted the last two remaining free blocks would leave IANA early next year.

“They will leave in January or February. That means that all the available blocks will be gone. Then we use the special measures. At the current rate, we will have six months or at most a year left.”

This is not a Y2K-redux problem — the Internet isn’t going to fall over. Mr. Pawlik makes the point that for those who have IPv4 addresses, the Internet will keep working as it always has done. It is just that you won’t be able to get a new IPv4 number, which could stall the explosive growth of the Internet.

There are technical hacks that ISPs can implement. A technique known as Network Address Translation allows a network of computers to be assigned a single IP address; this is how most corporate networks already work. Such a system could be used on a much bigger scale, but, cautioned Mr. Pawlik “It is complex, and the more complex a solution, the more likely it is to fail.”

Very little demand for IPv6 — yet

But like the Y2K problem, this is not new. We have known that the IPv4 address space would run out since the 1980s and a better IP system was agreed in 1998 which most computers already support. Known as IPv6, instead of 32-bit numbers, it uses 128-bit numbers, so rather than 4 billion addresses, IPv6 supports 2128 addresses, which is 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. What does that mean? According to this site, “The earth is about 4.5 billion years old. If we had been assigning IPv6 addresses at a rate of 1 billion per second since the earth was formed, we would have by now used up less than one trillionth of the address space.”

It’s a very, very, very big number.

According to Mr. Pawlik, despite the looming deadline, there is very little demand for IPv6 from his clients — the national ISPs. “They say there is no business case for it. Their end users are not asking for it, so why should we bother with this?”

Telefonica did not reply to requests for comment, and British Telecom was unable to provide anyone to comment on their network but did release a statement. “BT has been planning for the introduction of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) for some time now. We already have a large IPv6 address block allocated to it and are planning to enable the network with IPv6 capability during 2011/2012, subject to our customers’ requirements.”

However according to Hans-Martin Lichtenthäler, spokesman for Deutsche Telekom AG, their network is already capable of supporting both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic. He did say that Deutsche Telekom had not assigned any IPv6 addresses to its customers yet, and that it still had IPv4 addresses available to new customers, but he did expect to assign IPv6 numbers perhaps as soon as next year. “There is no trouble for Deutsche Telekom to change, it is already taken care of. We have a dual stack network that supports both.”

Comments (4 of 4)

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Though a sequel for "The Muppets" has been greenlit, a single star who was integral to bringing the franchise in to the new millennium won't be a component of it, reports Collider.
Jason Segel told the website he will not be signing up for yet another round with Kermit and Co. "It's correct [that I won't be in the sequel]," said Segel, "but it really is totally amicable. My target was to bring the Muppets back and I did that, leaving them in very very good hands." Segel mentioned he wants "to pursue a lot more human-related projects," adding, "All I wanted to do was to set the stage for them to complete whatever they wanted. I am confident I'll return in some capacity here and there, but that was half a decade of my life. Five years of challenging work. I am ready for just a little puppet break."

1:00 pm March 9, 2012

jeerkakn wrote:

Europe's best human rights watchdog has urged Germany to quit offering sexual offenders the choice of surgical castration.
The Council of Europe's anti-torture committee said in a report issued Wednesday that the practice, which aims to assist convicted sex criminals rein in their sex drives and lower their risk of reoffending, could effortlessly be regarded as "degrading therapy." According to Germany's 1969 Law on Voluntary Castration, someone more than the age of 25 could be subjected to surgical castration if he "displays an abnormal sex drive, which ... gives cause to suspect that he will commit 1 or far more criminal offenses." The controversial procedure is just not mandatory and a consensual offender can only have the operation after being informed of all of the implications of the choice and immediately after medical approval has been obtained, Germany stated in its response, adding that it would consider reviewing the issue.
But Berlin also cited the treatment's effectiveness, saying that from the 104 those who underwent the process within the 1970s, only three folks committed sexual crimes once more. Almost half from the 53 other individuals who refused or were denied therapy ultimately reoffended.
Voluntary castration is nevertheless very rare in Germany, with fewer than 5 instances per year inside the last decade.
The only other nation inside the 47-nation bloc of the Council of Europe that provides the procedure may be the Czech Republic, which has also been the topic of criticism in recent years for permitting sex offenders to opt for castration, a procedure it uses far much more regularly than Germany.

8:08 am December 30, 2010

700c wrote:

Companies that hold vast amounts of IP addresses that are not being used need to release them and properly subnet their networks. There is no need for a class A Network to have milions of unused IP addresses. Relase them and we will live another year. IP6 has problems that need to be sorted first.

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Tech Europe covers Europe’s technology leaders, their companies, and the people and industries that support them — and their ideas. The blog is edited by Ben Rooney, with contributions from The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.